`The Aviator' Really Soars

Movies - REVIEW - `The Aviator'

Leonardo Dicaprio And A Talented Cast Present A Uniquely American Tale.

December 24, 2004|By Roger Moore, Sentinel Movie Critic

The Aviator is the big, glorious epic Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio promised when they set out to make Gangs of New York, all those years ago. That one failed. This one -- their second teaming -- most emphatically does not.

It's a sweeping story of early Hollywood, early aviation and the bravado of a brilliant eccentric. It is also Scorsese's homage to Citizen Kane, a film of big American themes and great performances. And DiCaprio, stretching with all his might, does a good job of summoning up America's most famous and famously troubled millionaire, the reclusive movie and airplane nut Howard Hughes.

Scorsese's film is based on a screenplay from John Logan, the writer of Gladiator and the excellent TV film RKO 281, about the making of Citizen Kane. Aviator emulates Kane's arc, of a mama's boy who loses his mom too young and who carries her mania for cleanliness to scrub-til-it-bleeds extremes.

Young Hughes has to hire Noah Dietrich (John C. Reilly) as his right-hand man just to make the employees at the drill-bit works he inherited call him "Mr. Hughes."

With Dietrich at the helm, Hughes Tool will be the cash cow that will fuel young Howard's dreams of aviation and motion-picture glory.

The movie has a giddy start, thanks to a terrific first hour spent in Hollywood, making Hell's Angels, Hughes' bank-breaking blockbuster about World War I aerial combat. Scorsese, like Hughes, fills the sky with rickety biplanes, Zeppelins and pilots. Hughes, the perfectionist, can't let go of the movie.

"Let me give you a little advice" mogul Louis B. Mayer says, one of those "stick to what you know and leave the movies to us" moments. Hughes ignores him, finishes his movie his way, and it's a smash. He did this sort of thing time and again.

Sleepless in a screening room, staring at dogfight footage he would cut and recut and shoot and reshoot, DiCaprio starts to physically resemble the often disheveled drill-bit baron.

DiCaprio gets at the man's ability to seem distracted even as he is obsessively focused on a problem -- why his dogfights don't look chaotic and real, how he can make his planned racing plane, the H-1, faster and how to make TWA a great airline.

It's a movie of charm and wit, too. Hughes woos Katharine Hepburn (Cate Blanchett) with his airplanes, his hatred for Hollywood pretension and his eccentricity. Blanchett's "Hahahahahaha" performance, motor-mouthed, brash and brassy, reminds us why America eventually came to adore the original Kate. She was the great love of Hughes' life, his intellectual equal.

A third Kate, Beckinsale, is Ava Gardner, "the most beautiful woman in the world" -- aloof, sassy to Hepburn's brassy, and indulgent of Hughes' courtship, but only up to a point.

The arc of the story follows Hughes' rise to film and then aviation fame as a record-holder, his Quixotic pursuit of cutting-edge airframes for the military, and his descent into madness. Scorsese and Logan make the point that Hughes' underwent a lifelong slide into the neuroses that eventually made him a paranoid recluse.

"Milk, please," he tells a waiter at the Cocoanut Grove. "In the bottle. With the cap still on it." Even at his most "normal," Hughes didn't want anybody's germs in his drinks.

The able villains of the piece are Juan Trippe (Alec Baldwin), the Pan Am president who sought a monopoly on international American air travel, and the senator (Alan Alda) who tried to bust Hughes over alleged war profiteering.

The Aviator is a relatively brisk two hours and 45 minutes of aerial thrills -- including the crash that may have pushed Hughes over the edge -- Dante Ferretti's striking sets, shot with the saturated colors typical of earlier Technicolor films. Scorsese's many flourishes include gentle cuts between Hughes caressing Hepburn's shoulders, to running his hands down the smooth curves of his racer.

The film uses a mix of radio and newsreel audio from Hughes' day and modern, scripted imitations, and computer effects that make the infamous "Spruce Goose" seaplane fly again.

Holding it all together is DiCaprio, still boyish, but a young man confident enough to wear the seductive power of Hughes' myth, and his money. His Hughes flirts with the swagger of a rich Texan who could turn on the charm -- knowing that he was rich enough not to need to.

It's history and biography and, as Scorsese, Logan and Orson Welles before them affirm, a distinctly American story. Our national myth is that wealth and power corrupt -- that visionaries can realize their dreams of wealth, glory, and a movie star on each arm, at least until they fall.

That is why Howard Hughes, and the movies, were made for each other. And it's why The Aviator is one of the best pictures of the year.